As more and more users are equipped with smart devices, including smart phones, tablets etc., access to the Internet for gaining information and services has become convenient. As such, evolved mobile communications networks such as the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standards are being developed in order to incorporate features which can facilitate connection to the Internet and transmission of content data to mobile communications terminals wirelessly. The content data may be any type of data which is providing services to a user. For example, the content data may be streams audio or video content or a web page, but these are just examples. Therefore, the term “content data” should not be limited to a particular type of data but is generally used to infer higher layer user data.
Nowadays, it is very common that when users are taking public transportation, they would like to access the Internet for gaining the same content data or the content data from the same content provider with their respective mobile communication terminals. Especially, during rush hours, the number of the users accessing the same content data such as streaming video data at the same time would be significantly large. According to the current implementation in e.g. LTE, in this case, all the relevant mobile communication terminals within the public transportation (e.g. bus) will establish its respective evolved packet service (EPS) bearer to obtain the content data from a content provider, imposing a heavy load to the network.
However, considering the commonalities among multiple users, it is really an inefficient way to have multiple EPS bearers transmit the same or similar content data from the same content provider, which can result in unnecessary heavy loads to the network. Therefore, there is a need to find an efficient way to provide content data to user equipments.